Dan Gough rambles on about application packaging and virtualisation

Seemingly Missing Shortcuts in App-V 5.2

The App-V ‘5.2’ Sequencer (OK, it’s not really 5.2, but that’s what people commonly refer to as ‘the sequencer bundled with the Windows 10 ADK) detects applications a little differently to 5.1.

I’ll demonstrate using VLC, since it’s freely available, has multiple shortcuts to the same exe, and has shortcuts to non-exe files, all of which make it a great candidate.

So, if you do a basic sequence, App-V 5.1 picks up all 3 VLC shortcuts, as well as some URL and TXT files:

The latest sequencer though appears to just pick up a single shortcut:

However, when this second package is actually published to the client, all shortcuts appear, and they can all be found within the manifest and config files, although the 5.2 sequencer does not create <Application> tags for the URL and EXE files.

I would class this as a bug, since it’s not unheard of for applications to have multiple shortcuts that launch different apps yet point to the same executable. Windows provides methods of defining ‘host applications’ in the registry, or by using the Windows Installer MsiShortcutProperty table to define separate AppUserModel IDs to each shortcut:

However neither method makes the sequencer detect these VLC shortcuts as separate applications, so I’m calling this a bug.

Overall this doesn’t have a huge impact – you will just have to be doubly sure to modify all of your shortcuts whilst monitoring, something I have recommended since 5.0 was released due to the sequencer’s buggy handling of this aspect.

If you want these shortcuts to appear at the endpoint then nothing needs to be done. If you want them to show up as separate apps in the sequencer then you’d have to somehow point the shortcuts to different executables. You’d only have to do something different during monitoring if you wanted shortcuts removed, since you would no longer have that option in the sequencer UI (but since that option never works anyway, it’s business as usual).

Hi Dan, thanks so much for the post, we are seeing this exact same issue with VLC and now we know why!. Are you going to report this to Microsoft? I hope it gets addressed in the next Service Pack for App-V.